


new grass, new leaves

by thepensword



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: ADHD Zelda bc i said so, Character Study, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Selectively Mute Link (Legend of Zelda)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:41:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27097495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepensword/pseuds/thepensword
Summary: Link and Zelda and their destinies and identities; who they are, who they were, and a conversation without words.
Relationships: Link & Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 65





	new grass, new leaves

**Author's Note:**

> i genuinely don't know how i got here. i was working on finding sources for my paper about ADHD in college students and then 3400 words later i'm here. that feels ironical somehow. anyway, hi zelda fans! i started botw three years late and now it's all i can think about! enjoy!
> 
> as a note: i wrote this as strictly platonic link & zelda but if zelink is your jam it can be interpreted that way. zelink valid I'm just obsessed with platonic relationships and mlm/wlw solidarity. also i think zelda deserves to be a lesbian.
> 
> warning(s): potential self harm tw (no actual self harm, but potentially triggering metaphor usage), self-hatred, disconnect from identity

Link’s hair is greasy and tangled. It is knotted with grime and leaves and dried blood, and the wooden beads the Koroks had woven into a small braid behind his ear have cracked and burned away. Zelda’s fingers are as gentle as she can make them as she combs through the mess, ghosting against Link’s scalp and ears. He is leaning back with his head in a bucket of water; he is not watching her, but she is watching him. 

It has been nearly a week since Ganon’s defeat. It had taken that long for them to reach Kakariko Village, the first place they had felt safe enough to stop and finally breathe. Alone, Link could have made the trip much more swiftly, but Zelda was never strong, and she has been weakened by a hundred years’ captivity. They had stopped at stables along the way to rest, but never for longer than a single night, and never with the privacy of a room to themselves. They are headed to Hateno, where Link has made a home, but they have stopped here in Kakariko to pay Impa their respects. That will be tomorrow, they had decided. They had arrived late, weary and dust-stained from their travels, and so Link had paid for a room at the inn where they could clean up and rest before the morning.

They could have stayed, of course, in the empty and ruined castle. After all, her father is dead, and she is the princess; the castle is, technically, Zelda’s. But it is full of ghosts and nightmares, and if it were once a home that home is now long-since destroyed. Zelda had stood beneath its ruined walls and suffocated under their weight even with Ganon gone, and so without need for discussion they had simply turned and left.

It is good that they can communicate like that, without need for words. They were not always able to do so, and it had frustrated Zelda to no end. She is all words and thoughts and emotions, running from her lips unhindered, unfiltered; if there is a thought within, it is also without. Link is opposite (in many ways, but especially in this); he says little and gives nearly nothing away. If Zelda is fire, Link is a mountain, sheer immovable stone giving way to no mortal hand, only further hardened by scorching heat; together, they are volcanic. 

She wonders when that changed.

For it _has_ changed, certainly. It changed even before Link’s sacrifice. They were not quite friends, and they did not know each other, but there had been a shift nevertheless. After Link had saved her life, perhaps, when she had decided for the first time to try to slow herself to the steady and silent pace of his granite, rather than the liquid speed of her magma. It had been rewarding, certainly. She had not understood him, but she had read him, and communication without need for speech is an asset in many situations.

Link’s eyes are closed, now. His eyelashes are long and pale, clumped together with exhaustion and dirt. His face is lined: with anxieties, with destiny, with scars. There are freckles scattered across his nose and cheekbones, and the ghost of a dimple on his cheek. She’s never noticed these things before. Most of the scars are new, and she thinks the freckles are more prominent from time spent in the sun, but she had never before bothered to really look. Link was always behind her, before. She had been so bitter about her perceived place within his shadow; she had not stopped to consider she might be hiding him in hers.

They have spoken, in the last week. They have said nothing at all. Link has been silent, and he has not looked at her, and he has never looked away. And she has looked at him, trying once again to read him the way she once had, near the end, and she has found that his walls have fallen and been built back with far more doors and windows. For the first time, she sees inside, and she finds that she does not know him at all. And as she looks, he looks back. _What does he see?_ , she wonders.

“Turn your head,” says Zelda, gently guiding him to lean his chin towards his other shoulder so she can reach the tangles on this side. His eyes stay closed, his expression smooth and difficult to read. He is not watching her, but she is watching him.

Zelda thinks of all the things she has said to him, and all the gashes her gaze once carved into his skin. She thinks of how she had burned with her hatred of him, and she thinks, now, that she had never really hated him at all. No, she had hated _herself_ , she thinks, and in her blind fumbling to not drown in her own inadequacy, she had framed her own face as his. She looks at Link, now, and thinks these things, and she feels bitter and ugly and venomous. What horrible asp paints over the mirrors with the face of someone who should have been her friend? And what sort of god or hero or legend is Link, to take all that venom with marble stoicism, and protect the hideous creature with his life?

No, she thinks. Not a god, not a legend. Not even a hero. A boy. A child, like her, handed destiny too young; the only difference being, of course, that he had born it mutely, without complaint, and she had whined and cried and been consoled and all the while hurled the blame at him.

And he still saved her. He still fought for her. He still held her, near the end, when the champions had fallen; he still stood before her, sword raised, and died. He is still silent, uncomplaining, even now, with her hands in his hair.

No, they don’t know each other. They never have; she never even bothered to try. No one had, really; Link had been the hero, and that was all. Wielder of the sword. A weapon, not a person. A shield for Zelda. 

They’d all been complicit. Even Urbosa, wise and caring, had been complicit, always supporting Zelda and reminding Link to protect her in a quiet voice that perhaps she thought Zelda could not hear. Excusing her, even; _Zelda is stressed. She feels she has failed. You are the embodiment of everything she cannot be, and for that she hates you. Please understand. Please protect her._ And never, not even once, _he has a destiny as great as yours, or perhaps even greater. Be kind to him. Watch his back. Fight for him, as he fights for you._

The only one who had cared to know him had been Mipha. But Mipha is dead, and Zelda cannot ask questions of dead girls. She hasn’t that power, and spirits do not appear for her as they do for Link.

There had been moments, near the end, where she had thought she started to grasp him. He had nightmares, often; silent tremors that rattled the bed beside hers, shaking him awake to stare into the dark still as anything, eyes wide and cheeks wet with silent tears. Back then, Zelda hadn’t known what to do, and too many times she had simply closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. Once or twice, maybe a third time, she had crossed to sit on his bed and reach out to hold his trembling hand in hers. He had not looked at her then, and though he did not pull away, he also did not return the gesture when she squeezed his fingers or rubbed her thumb in circles against the outside of his hand. Perhaps he had been protecting her, even then, the feeble attempt at comfort on Zelda’s part more for her own reassurance than for his. 

That’s changed. The nightmares. They have not faded—perhaps they’re different, but Zelda has no way of knowing as Link never speaks of them—but the symptoms are different. He does not wake in silent tears, but in bitten off screams and wild eyes and a hand reaching for his sword. For two nights, Zelda had stared at him, and he had stared back, wild-animal breaths and fighter’s stance; both nights, he had come back to himself between one heartbeat and the next and then gone outside without a word. She had not followed him, though she had wanted to. She had not known if she’d be welcome. She did not think she had that right.

On the third night, Zelda had stood. He had watched her, far away, as she approached—she had sat beside him, and reached for his hand, and eased his fingers from the hilt of his sword. Then she had climbed beneath the covers and put her head on his pillow, and after a moment he had laid down as well. They had stared at each other, in the darkness, and then Link had taken her hand. She did not squeeze it; she did not dare. But he did not pull away, and the contact remained even as they fell asleep.

On the fourth night, at a new stable, Link had paid for only one bed. They climbed in together with no discussion, though the bed was too small for two; they had no need of discussion anymore. Link had taken her hand and when she squeezed, he returned the gesture. And on that night, he did not dream, and Zelda had lain awake staring at the smoothness of his brow. He had looked so young, like that; he _is_ young, painfully so, and so is she. 

Goddess, they are young. They are old. They are infantile and ancient. Neither of them had the chance to grow up, at least not properly. Both of them are stunted by the weight of destiny.

Zelda decides, suddenly, that if she does not say something now she will surely choke and die on the words in her throat. 

“Link,” she says, trying desperately to keep her voice from wavering and, as she so often does, failing miserably. “Who are you, taken through your own eyes, rather than through those of others? Who are you when you are not a legend?”

Links opens his eyes, and they are clear and blue and ancient and young. He is hero and boy at once. He is her dearest friend and her darkest failure. He looks up at her, in all of her hideousness, his bitter and venomous and inadequate shackle, and he turns his head just slightly to the side.

And he says, “I don’t know.”

* * *

Zelda’s fingers are gentle in his hair; gentle like her eyes, after the resentment and before the despair; gentle in ways Link has forgotten how to be. 

Zelda is silent. She has rarely been silent, in the last few days; she has said very much, most of it meaning very little at all. Her silence is an indication that she is deep in thought, the precursor to some heavier subject she wishes to broach but has not yet figured out how. Link is tense; he does not do well with conversation. This had been true before, when everyone in the world had looked to him as a weapon rather than a person, and it is certainly true now, with his fractured mind and puzzle-piece memory and only the barest grasp on his own identity. He prefers not to speak, when he can help it, though he will when absolutely necessary or when he is comfortable—or even better, anonymous, and therefore free of expectation—but in general, he would rather keep silent. Actions, not words. Fighting, not feeling.

Link is not a person who knows how to be at peace. 

And Zelda is reading him.

It is not a wholly foreign sensation. She has done it often, over the last week, and she’d done it even before his....well, his death. After she learned not to despise him, but before the end. In the brief moments of her hand reaching for his, of his fingers in turn wrapping discreetly around her forearm, supporting her from just a step behind and to the side. But they are different people now; she has been alone for a century, and Link remembers her only in flashes, and he does not want to stand behind and to the side any longer. Support is a river that must flow both ways; so too flows resentment.

And Zelda had resented him.

Link has always been a weapon and a champion and a symbol and a hero; he has never, not since he was very young, been a person. No one had bothered to remember his personhood, once he held the sword; when he wrapped his fingers around its hilt for the first time and raised it into the sky he felt his world crash down around him. The Link that was a person had died, that day, and with no one else to remember who he had been he made his face into a mask and his hands into swords, used his blood to transcribe his narrative and made his skin into paper to form a book of legends. He had made himself a weapon, locked his identity away, and tied himself to Zelda with ropes heavy with destiny, and that was the end for him. 

No one had bothered to give him the support he so desperately needed as a child handed destiny far too young; he was the Hero, the Champion, the Legend, and so no one had cared. _Protect Zelda. Save Hyrule. Wield the sword (the sword is what matters, not you; you are merely the vessel). She is struggling, so stay by her side. Pick her up when she falls. Do not complain when she breaks her mirror and digs the shards into your flesh as if she can carve away her own imperfections by projecting them onto you. You are made of metal and stone, in any case; no matter what, she cannot pierce your armor._ But no armor is perfect. There are always seams, and glass shatters into smaller and smaller needles.

And so he resented her, deep down beneath all the steel and bronze. 

Near the end, she had started to read him. She had looked at him with eyes that were gentle, but not gentle enough to heal the wounds she had inflicted upon him. She had looked at him like she wanted to understand who he was, like he was some great puzzle she did not know how to solve, and he had locked her out for fear that she’d find her answer: that behind the walls, there is nothing. That the child that was has died in there, and all that is left is the weapon.

It has gotten better, ironically, since he lost all memory of his life. Barefooted and alone in a vast and unknown world, Link had stood atop a mountain and felt freer than he ever had before, though at the time he had no memories to compare it to and therefore could not place the sensation. But he had known, then, that he felt so alive. Wind in his hair, sun on his skin. 

Link loves to cook, and he loves to play games with the Koroks. He loves to ride at full speed on the back of a horse whose trust he had earned solely on his own merit. He loves to trade insects with Beedle. He loves to throw himself from cliff-tops and glide to the earth far below, the closest to flight he will ever accomplish, and the closest thing to becoming air. Link is a wild thing, wind and water. He does not like walls.

But he has a destiny. And he had started to remember. And as he did, the walls came back, brick by brick by brick, and he could feel himself drowning. There is no wind inside of a tomb, and certainly no sunlight. Playing with Koroks is a waste of time when there is an ancient evil in need of vanquishing, and laughter feels like sacrilege in the ruins of a world he had failed to save. And the sword on his back is heavy, and the fabric of his tunic hides his skin from the sun.

Link is afraid, and he is numb, and the numbness causes more fear causes more numbness in a vicious loop of instinct and forgotten defenses. He is afraid because he thinks he is losing the identity he has only just started to discover again. He is numb because heroes cannot afford to feel fear.

Once upon a time, a boy had held a hero’s sword aloft and felt his world end. He had locked himself in a suit of armor and died in there, and no one had ever even noticed. A hundred years later, Link holds the same sword, and feels the same fear, and he knows: he does not want to die again.

And so, when Zelda’s gentle hands still in his hair and she asks him who he is when he is not a legend, he does not have an answer.

“I don’t know,” says Link, and what he means is: _will you show me?_

“That’s alright,” says Zelda, and what she means is: _I’m sorry, and I will help you_. She finishes untangling the knot in her hands and lets the strand fall, and then in the next moment her arms are around his shoulders and her face is pressed to the crown of his head, embracing him from behind with a fearful strength as though he might die again if she does not hold him tight enough. 

She blames herself, Link thinks. There is a part of him—or there once would have been a part of him—that cheers at this; finally, she has taken some of the burden of guilt. Finally, the curtain is flung back, and Link is not the only one she despises. Once, he would have revelled in this, in the bitter corners of his mind, the revenant remains of the dead boy behind the layer upon layer of mask and mask and mask and mask. But that Link is long gone, and this Link has forged himself anew. The cycle has not begun again, but a hundred years have passed, and Link is reborn regardless; and if he gets his second chance, wind in his hair, sun on his skin, then Zelda does too. A century is a long time for anyone, whether they remember it or not, alive or dead; Zelda now is not Zelda then, and this Zelda runs gentle hands through his hair and holds him like he is precious and watches him with wide blue eyes that for the first time understand he is person, not weapon. He had not let himself feel much for the Zelda that was, save for fragments of duty and resentment. But this Link, Link reborn, is wilder and freer, and so he does feel; and what he feels for this Zelda is love.

He does not know who he is. He is losing that which he has only started to grasp. He does not want to die behind the walls that Zelda herself helped to build. Here, now, she is offering to help break them down again, to reach her hand through the gaps in the stone and pull him back into the sunlight. She will not bury him. The scars she left will never fully fade, but he is alive, and he is ready to forgive.

No, not forgive. They are different people, now. Strangers. They do not know each other, and that’s better. New grass. New leaves. No more tombs.

Words are hard and unreliable. They say one thing and sometimes mean another, and sometimes intention does not pass intact from one’s mouth to another’s ear. So Link does not say what he means. Instead, he reaches up and holds her hand and squeezes.

“We could cut your hair,” he says, soft as a summer breeze in the first sunlight after rain. “I don’t know how, but I could try.”

And then Zelda is laughing, and sobbing, and they don’t know each other, but Ganon is gone and outside their window the moon is full and pale and bloodless and pure. It is spring, in Hyrule; the freshest spring in a century, with air crisp and clean and smelling sweetly of new leaves and possibilities. They do not know each other. Link does not even know himself. But Zelda reads him, like no one else ever has, and her hands are gentle, and they have that rare and precious thing: a second chance.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this all out of order and then pieced it back together and proofread it once and once only and it is currently 1:30am so. apologies if it wasn't super coherent dgkjhf
> 
> thank you for reading! drop a comment if you will, or visit my [tumblr](https://thepensword.tumblr.com)


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